science fiction

Sci-fi Sunday: First Niall Harrison “Memorial” Edition

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Oh god, can I just never see two men salute each other while fighting back the manly tears of manliness ever again? Catvalente.

As Martin Lewis said: Now that Niall Harrison has completed his multi-million pound international transfer from Vector to Strange Horizons, last Friday’s linkdump at Torque Control was probably the last. This leaves a gap in the market for an intelligent round-up of the best links from across the genre blogosphere. This probably isn’t that, but it’ll do until somebody starts something better.

Surface Detail – Iain M. Banks

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Cover of Surface Detail


Surface Detail
Iain M. Banks
627 pages
published in 2010

The problem with any new Culture novel is that they’ll never be as good as the original three — Consider Phlebas, The Player of Games and Use of Weapons. Back in the late eighties when these books were first published there was literally nothing like them; now we know what the Culture is like, what to expect from Banks and there are whole generations of sf writers who have been influenced by him writing similar sort of novels. Yet everytime I still hope that the next Culture novel is as good as the first three, which is unfair — even if it is, it won’t have the same impact.

But Surface Detail comes close. From his first published book, The Wasp Factory, Banks has had a reputation for writing well crafted but often repulsive scenes of violence and torture and here he surpasses himself. Because in Surface Detail he gives us a horrifying but all too plausible idea: what if you could use virtual realities to create the hells your religion says sinners should be cast down into? What if civilisations routinely went through a stage in their development when their technology was good enough to create simulations of hell, but their morality still primitive enough to actually want to subject people to them? One of the first scenes in the book shows what that would look like from the inside and it’s not for the squeemish; it actually gave me some bad moments reading it just before I went to bed. No cuddly fantasy hell this; imagine whole creative output of an entire species devoted to making up ever more cruel tortures, without end.

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The Pride of Chanur – C. J. Cherryh (reread)

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Cover of The Pride of Chanur


The Pride of Chanur
C. J. Cherryh
224 pages
published in 1981

I’ve read and reviewed The Pride of Chanur before, way back in 2001. That’s only three sentences long though, so high time for a reread and a proper review, especially as I’m trying to read more women sf writers this year, having discovered how unbalanced my reading was. Rereading old favourites like this one seemed a good way to start. Even if it did make me dream of kissing a Kif at Kefh.

The Pride of Chanur is a trade ship run by Hani –a race of bipedal intelligent lions– of the Chanur house/clan, captained by Pyanfar Chanur. She’s doing the rounds of her ship, currently docked at Meetpoint, the big interspecies trading station run by the stsho, when something speeds past her into the ship. At first thinking it some kind of animal escaped from another ship, it turns out to be sapient, but “naked-hided, blunth-toothed and blunt-fingered” unlike any species she knows, something that after careful questioning calls itself human and turns out to have escaped Kif custody, the Kif being a particularly nasty race of black robed, grey skinned, long snouted pirates and thiefs. She refuses to hand it –him– over to them and the result is she and her ship have to flee Meetpoint, one step ahead of the murderous Kif, who in the process blow up and murder another Hani ship…

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Shards of Honor – Lois Mc Master Bujold (reread)

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Cover of Shards of Honor


Shards of Honor
Lois McMaster Bujold
313 pages
published in 1986

I’ve reviewed Shards of Honor before, way back in 2001. Chronologically it’s the earliest story in the Vorkosigan series, with the exception of Falling Free. It is also the earliest published novel in the series and was based on an idea Bujold had for a Star Trek story. In the original story, the roles of Aral and Cordelia would’ve been played by a Klingon warrior and a Vulcan scientist; you can still sort of see the traces of this in the published book.

Cordelia Naismith is the captain of a Betan Planetary Survey Mission investigating a newly discovered planet, when her expedition is attacked by a Barrayaran force. She’s stunned and when she comes to she’s alone with the leader of that force, Aral Vorkosigan, left behind for death by his own internal enemies. They negotiate an uneasy truce to try and survive on a hostile planet to reach a survial cache left behind by the Barrayarans. After a long and ardeous trek they reach the cache, but something unexpected has happened in the meantime: they’ve fallen in love.

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Diplomatic Immunity – Lois McMaster Bujold

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Cover of the Diplomatic Immunity


Diplomatic Immunity
Lois McMaster Bujold
367 pages
published in 2002

Rereading Diplomatic Immunity on the heels of Komarr and A Civil Campaign drove home how conventional and slight it was compared to those two novels. It’s as if Bujold, having lost her nerve after having written two somewhat unusual novels, decided to go back to a tried and true formula of getting Miles into trouble and letting him dig his way out of it. Of course, she had also started her fantasy series at this point, so a more charitable explenation is that she had simply lost interest in Miles Vorkosigan and only wrote this to please her fans.

In any case Diplomatic Immunity is a bit disappointing. Nothing wrong with it as a story, but it misses the sociological insights and character depth of the previous two novels. What’s more, we only see things from Miles’ point of view, again unlike Komarr and A Civil Campaign. Which means that Ekaterin is demoted from co-protagonist to supporting character and worse, barely present. It’s Miles’ show all the way and Ekaterin is only there to lend moral support. Which is a criminal waste: she is what made Komarr and A Civil Campaign so good, as intriguing and strong a character as Miles himself. This novel would’ve been so much better if Bujold had let Ekaterin play an equal important part in the plot as Miles.

The plot itself is discussed in my original review. Sufficient to say that I’d largely forgotten it in the six years since. It’s compelling enough while reading, but ultimately on the slight side. I think I was right to describe it then as an exercise in nostalgia, a last look at Miles before Bujold went on to greener pastures, even though a new novel, Cryoburn has been published since.